AO3’s 15-year journey from blog post to fanfiction powerhouse - The Verge

Archive of Our Own, better known as AO3, started life as a simple blog post on LiveJournal before becoming a force in the fanfiction community.

In May 2007, fanfiction and traditionally published author Naomi Novik wrote a post on LiveJournal. “We are sitting quietly by the fireside, creating piles and piles of content around us, and other people are going to look at that and see an opportunity,” she wrote, referring to LiveJournal’s booming fanfiction community.

She feared that the community was open to exploitation. Where fanfic was a primarily female hobbyist space, a group of men had stepped onto the scene promoting FanLib, a commercialized site that would be populated with fan content. Though it garnered 25,000 members, it was also the subject of intense criticism by many people involved in fandom at the time who felt stung by having a group of perceived outsiders attempt to profit off work they had always provided freely.

“The people behind FanLib don’t actually care about fanfic, the fanfic community, or anything except making money off content created entirely by other people and getting media attention. They don’t have a single fanfic reader or writer on their board; they don’t even have a single woman on their board,” Novik wrote. She was clear about the solution to prevent their potential exploitation by these outside forces: “We need a central archive of our own.”

The Organization for Transformative Works, or OTW, a nonprofit with many arms all dedicated to preserving and advocating for fanworks, was founded a few months later. Archive of Our Own, now probably the best known and most popular fanfiction site on the web, was fully launched by 2009.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/15/23200176/history-of-ao3-archive-of-our-own-fanfiction

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